Tagged: rwa
12 results
Dave Hendricks
Dave Hendricks is the co-founder and CEO of Vertalo, an Austin-based platform that acts as an SEC-registered transfer agent and tokenization engine for real-world assets. He has spent close to a decade building infrastructure to turn illiquid private securities into compliant, transferable digital assets. A serial entrepreneur, he previously co-founded LiveIntent, the programmatic email advertising platform, and helped build CheetahMail into the world's largest email service provider before its 2004 sale to Experian. Earlier he ran the worldwide relationship between Arthur Andersen and Oracle and worked on large securitization projects. He is known for a pragmatic, institution-focused view of crypto and a habit of dismissing hype cycles in favor of durable financial plumbing.
Noble
Noble is a purpose-built blockchain for native asset issuance, focused on stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets. Built on the Cosmos SDK and connected through IBC, it is the canonical home of native USDC in the Cosmos ecosystem and the issuer of the yield-bearing Noble Dollar (USDN). Founded in 2022 by Jelena Djuric, Stefan Coolican and John Letey after the collapse of Terra's UST, Noble gives issuers such as Circle, Ondo Finance, Hashnote and Monerium a neutral, compliant rail to mint dollars and distribute them across dozens of connected chains - with no gas token required and fees paid in USDC.
Vertalo
Vertalo is an Austin-based fintech that operates an SEC-registered digital transfer agent and tokenization platform connecting the digital asset ecosystem. Since 2018 it has helped issuers, fund managers, broker-dealers and custodians move private securities on-chain - handling digital cap tables, investor onboarding, compliance and settlement across multiple blockchains. More recently it has pivoted toward 'agentic' infrastructure, exposing its regulated transfer-agency operations through APIs and an MCP server so AI agents can issue, record and transfer securities.
Huma Finance
Huma Finance is the first PayFi (Payment Financing) network, a blockchain protocol that lets businesses and payment providers borrow stablecoin liquidity against real-world receivables and invoices, settling cross-border payments and card transactions in seconds instead of days. Liquidity providers deposit USDC and earn double-digit yield sourced from the fees borrowers pay for that instant settlement. Founded in 2022 and built natively on Solana, Huma has processed more than $4.5 billion in transaction volume and launched its HUMA governance token in May 2025.
Re
Re is a blockchain-powered reinsurance protocol - often described as a decentralized Lloyd's of London - that connects alternative capital to regulated insurance risk. Built originally on Avalanche, Re lets stablecoin depositors back baskets of real reinsurance treaties and earn premium-driven yield, while the on-chain design brings transparency and auditability to a historically opaque, intermediary-heavy market. Founded in 2022 by former Cover CEO Karn Saroya, Re has grown to roughly half a billion dollars in total value locked and launched its $RE governance token in June 2026.
Karn Saroya
Karn Saroya is the co-founder and CEO of Re, a decentralized reinsurance protocol built on Avalanche that connects alternative capital to the nearly $1 trillion global reinsurance market. A Canadian-born, MIT-trained Fulbright scholar, he previously co-founded the YC-backed insurtech Cover and worked as a financial-services consultant at Oliver Wyman before deciding the insurance stack itself needed to be torn down and rebuilt on-chain.
Jack Chong
Jack Chong is the co-founder and CEO of Checker, a New York fintech that gives banks and payment companies a single API to reach the world's stablecoin and digital-asset liquidity. An Oxford PPE graduate who once trained to be a Chinese diplomat in the Arab world, he co-wrote one of the industry's first rigorous primers on real-world-asset tokenization before building Checker, which moved more than $3 billion in volume in under a year and raised $8M led by Galaxy Ventures, Al Mada Ventures and Framework Ventures.
Tzvi Wiesel
Tzvi Wiesel, who also goes by Todd, is the co-founder and CEO of BAXUS, an on-chain marketplace for rare wine and spirits built on Solana. A former fine-and-rare bottle and cask trader, he set out to fix what he calls an antiquated, broken secondary market for collectible liquids by giving each bottle a tokenized, tamper-proof record of provenance and ownership. Under his lead BAXUS acquired the collection-tracking app BoozApp, raised a $5M seed round led by Multicoin Capital, and now connects thousands of collectors, brands and institutions worldwide. He is also a working whiskey reviewer, heading the US reviews team at The Whiskey Wash.
Ondo Finance
Ondo Finance is a U.S.-based blockchain company that brings traditional financial assets - U.S. Treasuries, money-market funds, stocks and ETFs - on-chain as tradable, yield-bearing tokens. Through products like OUSG (tokenized short-term Treasuries), USDY (a yield-bearing dollar token) and Ondo Global Markets (tokenized U.S. equities), it aims to make institutional-grade financial products accessible to anyone, anywhere, around the clock. The company is also building Ondo Chain, a blockchain purpose-built for regulated real-world assets.
Ostium
Ostium is an onchain perpetuals exchange built on Arbitrum that lets anyone long or short real-world assets - stocks, commodities, indices, forex and crypto - directly from a self-custodial wallet, with up to 200x leverage and no broker in the middle. Founded by Harvard classmates and former Bridgewater hands Kaledora Kiernan-Linn and Marco Antonio Ribeiro, Ostium uses synthetic perpetuals and a custom oracle system to bring traditional markets onchain. It has processed tens of billions in cumulative trading volume and raised $27.8M total, including a $20M Series A co-led by General Catalyst and Jump Crypto in December 2025.
Kaledora Kiernan-Linn
Kaledora Kiernan-Linn is the co-founder and CEO of Ostium, an onchain exchange for trading perpetual futures on real-world assets like oil, metals, equity indices and FX. A former professional ballet dancer who performed at the Royal Danish Ballet before studying neuroscience at Harvard, she met her cofounder running arbitrage strategies out of a Cambridge hacker house and built Ostium into the category leader for 'perpetual-ified' traditional assets. In December 2025 the company raised a $20M Series A led by General Catalyst and Jump Crypto at a roughly $250M valuation, and she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Finance the same year.
Nathan Allman
Nathan Allman was the founder and CEO of Ondo Finance, the firm that did more than almost anyone to drag tokenized U.S. Treasuries from a whitepaper idea into a multi-billion-dollar reality. A Brown graduate and former Goldman Sachs digital-assets trader, he left Wall Street in early 2021 to build what he framed as a decentralized investment bank, betting that boring, yield-bearing, regulation-aware products - not speculation - would be how traditional finance finally moved on-chain. Under his watch Ondo grew to roughly $3.5 billion in total value locked, launching USDY, OUSG, Ondo Global Markets and the institution-focused Ondo Chain. He died unexpectedly in May 2026.